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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

I sort of agree: primary homes should not be considered an investment, but there's nothing wrong with owning real estate in general as an investment. I'd prefer real estate investors drive for their properties to generate regular income, though, rather than the common practice of buying property with the main goal of selling it later at a decent profit. That latter activity is one of the factors that drive up housing costs.

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This seems so backwards to me. One invests in the home they live in, to improve their quality of life and the value of their own property. Buying more properties than you need to live is what drives up housing costs, because other people need those homes to live in and you're using that core basic human need as a method to extract capital from them.

> you're using that core basic human need as a method to extract capital from them.

This isn't really an argument against doing it. People also need to eat (more than they need a house, in fact). Farmers still should be able to get paid for helping to meet that need. People need to drink water. If you sell them water, there's nothing wrong with that. Just because something is a basic human need doesn't somehow mean that it's wrong to profit from filling it.

The main issue is that we can make more food, but we can't make more land. We can make more buildings though. You'll notice that most of the appreciation in house prices lately has to do with land, not the buildings.

The fundamental error in our understanding of economics is treating non-produced goods like land as if they were "capital." There's nothing wrong with investing in producible goods -- in fact that's ideal. But when people gatekeep nonproduced goods, especially nonproduced goods that everybody needs to live (ie, land) - that's where everything breaks down.

There’s a difference between production and rent-seeking.

I actually prefer the exact opposite: the primary homes should be considered as an investment—i mean, obviously, we live in them—but secondary properties should be banned or strictly regulated as this encourages renting (and associated ballooning of the real estate market). Real estate as an investment asset is precisely the problem.

> I'd prefer real estate investors drive for their properties to generate regular income, though, rather than the common practice of buying property with the main goal of selling it later at a decent profit.

I'd prefer no real-estate investors other than home owners, honestly. They don't seem to add value to the world.

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